Klarinet Archive - Posting 000318.txt from 1998/06

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: [kl] Serious music and entertainment
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 00:53:50 -0400

Carl Schexnayder is bothered by

> the use of "classical" to refer to all serious music, since "classical"
refers
>to a period in history.

and I think he's right. I'm bothered too. Beethoven is classical. Handel
and Mozart are not. They're baroque. Tschaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov are
not. They're romantic. Bach, of course, is uncategorizable. Stravinsky is
not classical. He's an early modernist. And so on. But "periods" and dates
are unreliable, because Borodin is clearly a romantic, born out of his time..

And as Carl says, there's no use fighting it because
>using more precise terminology seems to confuse so many people.

Jazz musicians have, or used to have, a more useful catchall term - legit
music. I don't hear the word any more.

Carl and I part company, though, when he says

>Actually, I'd like to hear serious music referred to as "music" and any form
>of popular "music" referred to as "entertainment"! The only problem with
>that for me is that "entertainment" is not very entertaining!

Serious? I can't believe he's being serious. Maybe he's thinking about the
stuff most radio stations play today, some of it by groups whose names one
wouldn't want to mention on a family mail list.

But to grab various other names, very various ones, at random ....

Was Miles Davis a serious musician? or Benny Goodman? Duke Ellington? John
Coltrane? Bix Beiderbecke?
Were Rodgers and Hart serious composers? Lerner and Loewe? Kurt Weill and
Ogden Nash? George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward?
How about Wynton Marsalis and his new Blood on the Fields?

All these people and many more like them can't be dismissed as mere
entertainers. They are musicians of towering achievement. Entertaining?
Yes, usually. Was Mozart "serious" when wrote Cosi Fan Tutti and The
Marriage of Figaro, or was he, like Lerner and Loewe, out to entertain
people and make a little money? As for me, I can listen to Prokoviev's
Second Piano Concerto, or to Goodman's Sing Sing Sing, over and over, with
the same pleasure each time. In my book, Anton Rubenstein and Thelonious
Monk were both great pianists and composers. Monk, of course, was the more
original of the two.

Popular music can rise to the level of high art. Of anyone who isn't
transported by the delicacy and verve of Beiderbecke's famous solo on I'm
Coming, Virginia, or the bitter sweetness of Kurt Weill's haunting Speak
Low, or delighted by the masterful matching of words to music in Lerner and
Loewe's On The Street Where You Live (its bridge alone could serve as a
texbook for lyricists), I'm tempted to say he must have no music in his soul.

But of course, neither Carl nor I is right, because there are no fixed
esthetic standards. They are always in a state of flux, so there are no
rights and wrongs when it comes to taste. I like it and I don't like it
are equally non-debatable statements. De gustibus disputandum non est, as
the old lady said when she kissed her cow.

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